Leontyne

LEONTYNE

By barge from London to Vienna

RICHARD GOODWIN

To my wife

Preface: Leontyne and I

Chapter One: London to Calais

Chapter Two: Calais to Bruges

Chapter Three: Bruges to Agimont

Chapter Four: Agimont to Rheims

Chapter Five: Rheims to Paris

Chapter Six: Paris

Chapter Seven: Paris to Montbard

Chapter Eight: Montbard to Mulhouse

Chapter Nine: Mulhouse to Mannheim

Chapter Ten: Mannheim to Frankfurt

Chapter Eleven: Frankfurt to Nuremberg

Chapter Twelve: Nuremberg to Passau

Chapter Thirteen: Passau to Vienna

Acknowledgements

Plates Section

I can't remember when my dream turned into a plan, but I do remember when real things started to happen. I remember standing on the Pont des Arts in Paris one morning and watching the barges ploughing up and down. They were complete; families, children, even a car on board for some. Where they stopped for the night was home, wherever they were. It was then I decided that I wanted to sample the half-gypsy life that these people lead; stopping, making new friends here and there and, above all, greeting the bright morning light over the countryside, always changing, always new.

I live by the river in London, so some years back I put out some inquiries amongst the river people I knew and, to my surprise, within days I was told they had just what I wanted, a converted launch tug. A bit too soon, I thought, but I went to have a look all the same. There she was, black and rusty and cruelly converted into a kind of cabin cruiser. The motor was far too small for such a heavy boat, the hull was thin in places and in many parts there was a layer of concrete to stop leaks. But there was something about her tenacious shape and lowness in the water that made me feel that she could carry me to wherever I wanted in perfect safety. Her vital statistics were 30 feet long, 9 feet wide and she drew just on 4 feet of water. She weighed over 14 tons and was so low in the water that she could pass under almost any bridge. A deal was struck, probably too much, but for £4000 she was mine.

I had to register her name with the relevant authorities
before I could go anywhere, in this case with the Board of Trade. This vessel of mine was known to all who worked on the Thames as the
Leo
. I liked the name but the Registry said that there were nine other Leos and if mine was to be the tenth, I would have to produce her birth certificate. This proved to be impossible. The best I could do was to find out that she had been built in 1926. By whom and where was very unclear. Some said Odell's Yard at Brentford: some misty eyes remembered Odell bringing her over from Holland to use as a template for other similar tugs he was building. As I delved, I found out that the
Leo
had been owned by all sorts of river people, some of whom had passed bundles of notes to each other and were guarded about their ownership in any case: they certainly didn't have any bits of paper. One of these likely lads, a gloomy ex-lighterman, volunteered that I would certainly perish in her, as he had nearly done going round to Harwich when a sudden storm blew up.

Alarmed, I went down to the berth where she was lying and had a serious moment wondering whether this was a final madness. But I knew in my heart that I would never be happy if I didn't get to France; so all possible risks were forgotten and the preparations began. I had registered the boat as the
Leontyne
but by all her friends she is still known as the
Leo
, strange hermaphroditic beast that she is. The wondrous sound of Leontyne Price's voice (on my very first visit to the opera, I heard her sing
Aida
in Milan) could well also have had something to do with my choice of name.

Before the great adventure described in this book, I took the
Leo
on several voyages, preparations, as it turned out, for the big one. Our first Channel crossing was uneventful until we were in the middle of the main shipping lane. We were using the proper procedure to cross at right angles so as to be in the danger zone for as little time as possible, when quite suddenly, one of the rigid fuel lines on the engine burst. Something like that happens very rarely. Fortunately we had a spare but fitting it as we rolled about in the wash
of half a million tons of supertanker was alarming. At last, one of my friends from the river, Paul Wilson, finished the job and the engine turned over again. I wondered if we had made even the tiniest blob on anybody's radar.

I took my family through Paris and round the glorious canals in the centre of France and then decided that I should have to bring the
Leo
home and put a bigger engine in her. After two years of wandering through the summers I recrossed the Channel and had a new engine put in for the next expedition.

This voyage was from London to Calais with one foot in the gutter, as it were, round to Cherbourg, and then down to St Malo. We only just made it before the weather broke, after five clear calm days in May. Then, on through the Brittany Canals, which are too narrow for today's commercial traffic, to Redon and then to Nantes and out into the Bay of Biscay.

We had to turn back almost at once, as the huge Atlantic swells got hold of the
Leo
and tossed her about like a plastic cup. Chastened, we ran for cover to St Nazaire. Happy to limp into harbour we spent the night in the old submarine pens, a night that will be long remembered by the ship's company, my children, Sabine and Jason. Cold, uncomfortable and noisy; the fishing fleet tied up and unloaded their fish next to us just when we had nodded off. Still it was a great deal better than some watery grave off the Isle of Noirmoutier.

The next year I continued through the Bay of Biscay in perfect weather and up the Gironde to Bordeaux. Then I set out through some of the most beautiful parts of France. I remember eating fritters made from the flowers of acacia that a lady lock-keeper, seeing I was alone, had kindly made for my supper. In these parts, the lock-keepers have sovereign rights, it seems, over the land fifty yards up- and downstream of their lock. I had asked to moor in the shade under the enormous acacia trees, and that was how I came to eat this delicious
and recherché meal. I gave her a plastic bottle of Scotch whisky for her husband. As I left in the dawn the
éclusière
, rather shyly I thought, gave me half a dozen eggs. She said that she was very grateful for the Scotch and indicated that her husband had enjoyed it and her. I suppose May is rather a good time for that sort of thing.

As the
Leo
and I ploughed our way through the peaceful canals lined with yellow wild irises, the water covered with the fluffy flowers of the acacia trees that lined the bank, it came to me that here was real exploration. Discovery of what life could be like if lived at a human pace. Just the odd contact every hour or so with a lock-keeper and time to think without fear of interruption. I began to think about where else I could go after I had completed my present trip, how it could be financed and whether I really wanted to do it. Perhaps I was seduced by the idyllic surroundings, but it was here I decided that I would make a real voyage, not just a holiday adventure, to some faraway place. If I could get it together, I would try to go down the Rhine, up the Main, over the European watershed (the watershed stretch would have to be by land as the new canal currently in construction would not be finished for some years) and then down the Danube to Vienna. Of course the
Leo
would not have enough accommodation for a lengthy trip but perhaps since she was a tug she could tow a barge or even, as was becoming more fashionable, push one.

After my couple of trips abroad, I felt I was ready for the big voyage. The
Leo
and I had done our homework. I knew what she needed and knew where we were going. The only thing that remained was to finance the adventure. Now, I've worked in movies all my life, doing a bit of everything, and, if there is one thing I've learned, it is that if you really want to do anything, you have to make a serious start yourself with whatever resources you have available. It seems that personal commitment and enthusiasm are the main ingredients for persuading financiers of the worth of a project. So I
decided to convert over the next year the
Mercat
, a Thames lighter that at one time had been a high-security barge, which meant, amongst other things, that it had a galvanized hull. The first major work was to take out the ceiling of the barge (oddly named as it is in fact the floor). The boards had completely rotted and we had to replace them with a special mixture of fast-drying concrete up to the level of the steel frames of the hull – about nine inches of concrete were required. Quick-drying concrete has to be used because the mixture must dry while the vessel in on a flat bottom – if the tide comes in before the concrete is properly set it will dry at an angle, meaning your boat has a permanent list.

Then the ordering began, and all that winter welders worked intermittently, installing all the big items, in the correct order. Holes were cut in the aft deck for the generator which was housed behind the aft bulkhead. Steel box bars were rolled to form the same curves as the combings, so that the hold of the barge was enclosed. Doors were cut in the bulkheads and tanks were installed for water and fuel.

Once the welding was out of the way, the carpenters got cracking. I installed a formidable diesel cooker which I found in a chandler's who had had it in his basement for eight years (meaning that I got it cheap). There were three sleeping cabins, one which I had designed for my daughter Sabine, a double one for guests, and my cabin, which was naturally slightly larger than the others with a desk in it, as I had visions of writing Captain Bligh-type logs far into the night. In the event I was nearly always too exhausted to do anything but jump into bed and fall asleep.

The total area on the barge available for living was sixteen by thirty-three feet. Apart from the cabins, there were two bathrooms, both with electric lavatories which always blocked at the most inopportune moments. The forward bathroom had a minuscule bath which was hardly ever used on the voyage, not because we were particularly dirty people but because it was such a performance to have a bath and
we frequently did not have enough water. We had to make other arrangements. The rest of the area was made up of the saloon, which was lined on the port side with the diesel cooker – this also coped with the central heating – a double sink and a freezer. In the middle, I had put a table from a monastery that I had bought years before in the New Forest. In the swinheads, the angled bits at the ends of the barge, I had fitted a generator in the aft section and in the larger forward section there was a 400-gallon fresh-water tank, a holding tank for the sewage, and a massive bank of batteries to give us a 24-volt DC supply plus a back-up bank in case they failed.

Entrance to the barge was from the stern of the saloon down a stairway, under which was a hot water tank which was heated by both the central heating and the generator. This very nearly caused an accident on one occasion when we left the generator running with no water in the system: the effect was rather like the invention of the steam engine and caused a considerable explosion, splitting the sides of the copper canister as though it were a rotten peach. The interior of the barge was lit by ports in the deck above and by portholes in the sloping sides of the barge which reflected dancing light off the water in a most pleasing manner.

All through the early summer months, I tried out the rig. The
Leo
was now pushing the barge which I had renamed the
Leontine
to make the lock-keepers believe that it was really the same vessel and thus reduce the paperwork – a ruse that I am happy to say worked very well. Because of the huge pressures on the deck equipment we had a number of breakages. Pins snapped off, steel wires broke and it became obvious that this was an area that I simply could not afford to try to save money on. So I had to exchange all the winches holding the two boats together for heavier gear. Up and down the Thames we went, raising eyebrows everywhere. Over and over again I was told that I couldn't think of getting to Vienna in that.